Event Horizon – Trailer Redesign

One of the bigger projects I’ve embarked on for my portfolio recently is a complete audio redesign of the trailer for ‘Event Horizon’ from 1996. It’s always been a favourite film of mine and I thought it would be a suitable challenge.

In a previous redesign video I worked on the opening sequence to Gerry Anderson’s UFO (check it out here) and I think this was good preparation for what lay ahead in Event Horizon. It was a longer piece of footage, even after I’d edited it slightly to remove scenes with dialogue in, and also involved a lot more opportunity for creative sound design.

I started looking at the sound design elements of the trailer before getting stuck in to composing some suitable music, I think this was really so I could see how the feel of the trailer changed over time and how I could fit the music around this. I used a mixture of library sounds (explosions mainly) and original audio assets recorded at home and from the past few years in various locations. All the audio was heavily edited to fit with the video, including pitch, EQ, reverb and modulation effects.

Part of the project inside Logic – the edited trailer can be seen in the video channel at the top. I also included some markers to help with my workflow.

This was the first time I’ve created a project using this many audio assets (over 200 in total) and the screenshot above shows a little of how my project was laid out. Some sounds are used throughout the video (such as some low frequency rumble sounds) whilst others are just used for particular moments.

Zoomed in to a small section of the project – here I’ve used a variety of home recorded and designed sounds including a hand dryer and my own breathing, as well as some stretched out violin stabs!

I recently posted about some sound design I worked on using a slate chopping board in my kitchen here that ended up being used to form part of the sound of the ship’s ‘Gravity Drive’ and I’ve found my library of sounds incredibly useful for this project. I used sounds from air conditioners, hand dryers, vending machines, cassette players and a lot more. I also used some excellent sounds from the Logic sound library and manipulated these so they worked, mostly this involved some pitch shifting or spectral effects such as blurring. Whilst I’d love to go out and record some electrical explosions and such like, it wasn’t really possible for this project! I feel it’s important if you use sound libraries that you give them credit, and that you have the right to use them in the first place.

I’ll be posting the video without music soon so you’ll be able to hear all the SFX without the music getting in the way and I’ll post more about how I created some of the sounds in the near future.